Keeping pets is a never-ending task, requiring one to constantly feed groom and clean-up after their animal friends. For those that raise, breed, or board cats; their responsibilities also include maintenance of a litter box. While the use and maintenance of a litter box at home is relatively easy, it becomes a much different story when the pet and pet owner travel or are away from home for any length of time. The cat owner must ensure that the regular litter box, a bag of cat litter, tools to remove droppings, and supplies to clean the litter box all must travel as well. While these supplies can be packed, they do require some planning and time to accomplish and often times take up valuable space. However, in emergency situations, such time is often not available. Unfortunately, this makes use of the standard litter and box system inadequate for travelling purposes.
Various devices have attempted to provide portable pet litter pans, containers, or similar systems. Typically these attempts include lightweight deployable enclosures which form box-like containers when in an erected state. Examples of these attempts can be seen by reference to several U.S. patents. U.S. Pat. No. 4,348,982 issued to Selby discloses a disposable cat relief chamber. U.S. Pat. No. 4,776,300 issued to Braddock discloses a corrugated kitty litter box. U.S. Pat. No. 4,800,842 issued to Jones, Jr. discloses a disposable pet sanitary station having a fixed lower compartment and an expandable upper compartment. U.S. Pat. No. 4,884,527 issued to Skirvin discloses a self-contained disposable animal commode. U.S. Pat. No. 4,940,016 issued to Heath discloses a unitary collapsible and disposable pet litter container. U.S. Pat. No. 5,211,134 issued to Bolo, III discloses a collapsible disposable litter box. U.S. Pat. No. 5,582,135 issued to Bellows discloses a collapsible and disposable pet litter container. U.S. Pat. No. 5,730,085 issued to Santoiemmo discloses a lightweight disposable kitty litter box. U.S. Pat. No. 5,913,282 issued to Indes et al. discloses a pet litter box.
While these devices may achieve their purported objective each suffers from one (1) or more disadvantage or deficiency related to design or utilization. Particularly, these attempts appear to lack sufficient structural integrity to withstand use by the cat. Many of the devices also require somewhat complicated tongue and groove, fold and attach systems which can be cumbersome to set up in many common situations.